Diana West: Brent Bozell’s Brave New World — ‘The Stone Standard’

I read the statement you made as president of the Media Research Center, applauding CNN and MSNBC for banning Trump supporter Roger Stone from their presidential election coverage.

CNN, Politico reports, banned Stone in February over his tweets about Jeb Bush supporter and CNN analyst Ana Navarro (Stone called her “Entitled Diva Bitch,” “Borderline retarded,” and “dumber than dog s—” [stet]). The MSNBC ban follows Stone’s recent radio discussion of his planned Stop the Steal movement at the upcoming GOP convention in Cleveland, in which, as Breitbart reports, he said there would be protests, demonstrations and that

we will disclose the hotels and the room numbers of those delegates who are directly involved in the steal. If you’re from Pennsylvania, we’ll tell you who the culprits are.

We urge you to visit their hotel and find them. You have a right to discuss this, if you voted in the Pennsylvania primary, for example, and your votes are being disallowed.

You then wrote that such threats

and his [Stone’s] long history of incendiary and offensive rhetoric add no value to the national discourse. … Stone is a thug who relishes personal insults, character assassination, and offensivegestapo-like tactics that should be unequivocally dismissed by civil society, most especially those who might give him a platform from which to spew his hatred.

The news media have for far too long ignored Stone’s inflammatory words. I hope all media outlets that lament the debasement of political dialogue and the gutter politics for which Stone is infamous follow the lead of CNN and MSNBC. The media should shun him. He is the David Duke of politics. Those with whom he is affiliated should denounce him in no uncertain terms.

Having seized these non-partisan heights of rhetorical-cleansing — which has nothing to do with your visceral opposition to Donald Trump (whom Stone supports) — I will assume this is only your first step.

That is, Stone Standard in hand, you must be now turning your cleansing energies toward the rest of the Right, where public rhetoric of crudity and intimidation very often exceeds that of former CNN and MSNBC commentator Roger Stone, Hated One.